But It's Better If You Do
by kiwiosity
Summary: There's not much you can do when your ex-girlfriend shows up at your front door with a bullet in her side, claiming she's a spy for the CIA and that your life is danger, but Zachary Goode had always hoped he'd never be in that sort of situation / AU
1. running

**running**

- and getting shot at.

A life experience, probably. Hopefully not the last life experience he has. Up ahead, his girlfriend (should he call her that? His ex-girlfriend? The girl who once pretended to like him to see if he knew anything about his psychotic information-stealing mother, which he didn't, because she was secretly a world-class spy?) is yelling at him to hurry up, but he's never run this fast before, and his legs are wearing out, and his heart is pumping and the adrenaline is surging and -

* * *

><p><strong>a week earlier<strong>

Cammie wasn't the worst girlfriend I'd ever had. She wasn't the best, either. She was pretty, in an understated kind of way, and she knew a lot of things, even though she didn't go to college. I met her at a coffee shop by my apartment building, where she was working as barista. We dated for ten months _exactly_, and those ten months, if I were to recall them, weren't very distinguished. With relationships, there are always very distinctive characteristics; the type of shampoo she uses that makes you want to kiss her, or an inside joke that can make you smile even if you've been broken up for a while. But Cammie, she didn't leave anything.

We didn't fight much. We talked a lot. She said the right things but always looked bored. At six months, she moved in to my apartment, and I never saw where she stayed before that. At eight months, she wanted to meet my family. At ten, she took everything of hers and left, and I never heard from again. For some reason, I wasn't that sad, or maybe I was just too busy with college to really notice.

This was two years ago.

:::

I was fixing myself dinner when there was a knock at the door. My dinner, which was a pathetic combination of canned beans and leftover turkey, was looking at me sadly, so I stuck it in the microwave before walking over to the front door. It was probably Grant looking for a place to crash after another fight with his girlfriend, or my landlady, because I could never remember/afford to pay the rent.

Peeking through the peephole - who had named that? Probably a weirdo who used peepholes for creepy purposes - I saw, surprisingly, not my landlady _or_ Grant, but Cammie. She didn't look that different, except she was wearing earrings. They looked new. Maybe she had a new boyfriend.

Confused, I opened the door.

"Hi, Zach," she smiled. She was wearing a thick, expensive-looking overcoat, and her hands were deep inside her pockets. Her eyebrows are furrowed, and her forehead is dotted with beads of sweat. "Can I come in for a minute? I need to talk to you about something important."

She didn't wait for an answer, and instead slipped under my arm and headed straight for the kitchen. I could hear her banging open cabinets and opening the fridge, and, growing steadily more confused, I closed the front door and followed her. Her coat was now laying on the counter, and she was standing on a chair, reaching for an unopened bottle of whiskey I vaguely remembered receiving as a gift.

"How did you get up here without getting buzzed in?" I asked slowly, looking at her coat. I swore I thought the barrel of a gun sticking out the pocket, and I stared at it for a moment, before the sound of the cabinet slamming brought my attention back to the problem at hand: my ex-girlfriend rummaging around in my kitchen for alcohol, and - "_Holy shit_!"

"This stupid shirt," Cammie muttered, using a pair of kitchen scissors to cut away at the bloodied blouse she was wearing; a fragmented bullet appeared to be lodged in her side. She looked up, clearly in pain but obviously used to it. I gaped, as she asked nonchalantly, "Do you have any salt?"

"Uh," I stammered, staring, hoping my voice didn't actually sound as high as I imagined. "I'm not - I, uh, salt. Salt is in the pantry. I'll get it for you. Um, should you really be...not at a hospital? Because I think you've been shot at -"

"No," Cammie said, as I reached into the pantry. "Put a tablespoon of salt into a cup of warm water."

"No, you haven't been shot at?" I asked, filling a small glass with water and adding what I thought was a tablespoon of salt. "It's pretty evident by um, the bullet, that you've been shot at, Cammie, I mean, no offense or anything."

"No, I shouldn't be at a hospital," Cammie said, as I handed her to glass. She stirred the salt with her little finger until it dissolved. She frowned as she cut away at the last of her blouse, leaving a big, empty space. Her wound dribbled blood as she reached for a paper towel. "God, Kevlar sucks."

"Kevlar," I repeated. "The stuff the army uses for its uniforms." I pause, then, in a noticeably strained voice, "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah, this happens a lot," Cammie shrugged.

"Does it now?" I asked, nodding feverishly. "Well, that's...exciting."

Cammie clapped a bloody hand to her forehead suddenly, and she gasped, "Shit, I forgot -" Her hand left a bloody mark on her forehead and hair, but she seemed more concerned with me, looking worriedly in my direction. "You don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

"No, I was undercover, you think I'm a _barista_," Cammie was muttering, tugging at her hair with a frown. She regarded me again. "Well, you were going to find out sooner or later, I guess. Sooner, rather, because later you'd be dead." This seemed to be a vocal train of thought. She pressed her lips together. "Zach, I haven't exactly been honest with you about who I am."

I blinked at her.

No kidding.

* * *

><p><strong>an: **thoughts?


	2. unbelieving

**unbelieving**

"I'm a spy," she repeated carefully, looking at me directly. She'd almost finished tending to her wound. Seven bullet fragments and a pair of tweezers lay on a paper towel on the kitchen table. Vaguely, I remembered my dinner was still in the microwave. I didn't feel much like eating. "I work for the CIA. You are in danger, and we need to move as soon as possible."

I stared at her for several seconds. She was putting band-aids - band-aids, on a bullet wound - over each of the little lesions in her skin. Most of the blood had been cleaned off. I was sitting on a chair.

"I don't know how you expect me to believe that," I told her, honestly, for the third time in a row. Her jaw clenched, and her eyes flashed, but I was refusing to believe that I had once dated a spy. Besides, could Cammie _actually_ be a spy? For all I know, she could be a _druggie_, or something, and she'd gotten shot because...I don't know, don't druggies get shot a lot? "I'm sorry. I'll call an ambulance, and you can go deal with whatever problem you're having -"

I was interrupted by a flying whiskey bottle, which Cammie had, with lightning speed, picked up and thrown in my direction in exasperation. It broke and shatter at my feet, soaking my socks in alcohol, and Cammie put two hands on the kitchen table and leered over me in a surprisingly menacing manner. "Zachary, if you _dare_ compromise my _mission_ because your _tiny_ civilian mind _can't_ wrap itself around the idea that _I_ am a spy, I swear to God, I will shoot you in your _fucking mouth_ and make it look like a suicide."

Glancing at the coat, I concluded that what I thought was a barrel of a gun turned out to be, in fact, the barrel of a gun. I decided to shut up.

"So how long, then?" I asked conversationally.

"What?"

How long have you been a spy?"

Cammie thought about it. Then, hesitantly, she answered, "There's never been a time...when I considered myself to be...normal."

I raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't everybody feel that way?"

"I got a butterfly knife for my sixth birthday," Cammie said. I nodded, understanding. She observed me momentarily, before a knock at the door caused her flinch and look away, suddenly on alert. "Don't move," she whispered quietly, as I stood up. Another knock, three times in a row. Some footsteps outside. Heavy ones. She glanced at me. "Just kidding. You need to move."

"What? Where?"

"The window," she murmured, inching towards the door. More knocks. "Shoes. Wallet. Then window." She looked back. "Now!"

In a flurry, I grabbed my wallet from the kitchen counter and shoes from the floor of the living room, then nervously stood by the window, wondering what the hell I was actually supposed to be doing. The front door was knocked down by three burly-looking guys, and one of them yelled, in a deep, gruff, voice, "That's him!"

"What the hell are you waiting for?" Cammie screamed, as she punched the closest guy in the face; he fell back into the second guy and they fell to the ground, before she kicked the third guy in the nose. There was a sickening crunch as the third guy backed up, howling, but the two guys on the floor were already getting back up, and to my dismay, it looked like they had guns. "Open the fucking window!"

"Why?"

"To _jump_, you idiot!" Cammie yelled, scampering between the two men advancing, then kicking them both, hard, on the back. With all three men very temporarily immobilized, she ran again towards her coat, pulled out her gun, and shot three times: one for each head.

Up until that point, I'd never seen somebody get shot before, unless you counted action movies. It wasn't very pretty. Actually, it was extremely disgusting. I looked away quickly, but somehow couldn't stop the pride that I'd had sex with someone so cool.

"Somebody definitely heard that," Cammie muttered. "Why is the window still not open?" With obvious adrenaline coursing through her veins, she thrust open the window and pushed the screen out. It fell to the concrete street below with a clatter, and she poked her head out.

"I'm more used to doors," I confessed, peering out the window. The ground was very far away.

"Because we can really leave the building through the front door right now," Cammie said, shrugging on her coat, her tattered, bloody blouse flapping in the wind. "It's forty feet to a Dumpster. You'll live." Without warning, and with way more strength than I was expecting, she pushed me and I tumbled, somersaulting, out the window.

And you wonder why I wasn't sad when she left.

* * *

><p><strong>motel<strong>

"I smell like shit," I frowned.

"Yeah. You fell in a big pile of it," Cammie, who was currently brushing her teeth, in the bathroom, said.

"I think I'm in shock," I said, feeling my forehead. I couldn't quite remember what had just happened, but my heart was beating extremely fast, my hands were sweating, and I hadn't quite registered the fact that after we'd fallen into the Dumpster, we'd run for eight blocks (Cammie faster than me, somehow, even though there was no way her bullet wound could've healed yet) before finally, like normal people, catching a taxi, and arriving at a seedy motel.

"Probably," Cammie shrugged. She exited the bathroom and went to her backpack, which was sitting on a moldy armchair in the corner of the motel room. "But before you pass out, you might want to read this."

It's a manila file. It reads _Zachary Goode_.

* * *

><p><strong>an:** okay i'm really undecided right now because in the middle of writing this, i got a plot bunny and wrote the first chapter to another story called 'risky business' and cammie is a spy and goes undercover as zach's secretary and zach is rich and tragic and idk if i should publish it so thoughts?


End file.
